The December 2019 edition of Reflections is now available! This edition focuses on Community Engagement in Humanitarian Healthcare, and features commentary from Yusuf Kabba, President of the Sierra Leone Association of Ebola Survivors (SLAES). You can find it at the link below- and don’t forget to subscribe for future Reflections!
Link to Reflections December 2019.
North-South research partnerships are a critical means of advancing global health research. However, research partners from the Global South have described feeling they were included to full funding requirements, and offered only token roles, saying “we were there to colour the soup.” Despite good intentions, researchers from the Global North often fall into patterns of tokenism. This 2-page report captures key lessons learned from our experiences of and data collected from two elrha-r2hc funded studies: (1) Aid when there is ‘nothing left to offer’: A study of ethics & palliative care during international humanitarian action, and (2) Isolation, quarantine, and research in Ebola management: A comparative study of stakeholder perceptions and experiences. These reflections point to possible strategies to move toward the goal of authentic partnerships during humanitarian health research. It reflects the reality that the overwhelming majority of transnational partnerships are collaborations in which researchers from Global North countries partner with researchers from what are essentially “research site” countries in the Global South.
PDF: FROM TOKENISM TO MEANINGFUL PARTNERSHIPS – FINAL [EN]
PDF: FROM TOKENISM TO MEANINGFUL PARTNERSHIPS – FINAL [FR]
Suggested Citation(s):
Humanitarian Health Ethics Research Group. (2019). From Tokenism to Meaningful Partnerships. Isis A. Harvey designer. Available Online on the Humanitarian Health Ethics Website.
Humanitarian Health Ethics Research Group. (2019). Du symbolism aux partenariats authentiques. Traduction [de l’anglais]: Aziza Mohamadhossen. Isis A. Harvey conception graphique. Disponible sur le site web de Humanitarian Health Ethics.
New Paper by Donal O’Mathuna & Matthew Hunt
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/DPM-01-2019-0006/full/
“Paul Ricoeur was one of the leading philosophers in the twentieth century, writing on a wide variety of topics. From these, his work on translation and on ethics provided suitable ways to examine ethical issues in crisis translation. In particular, his concept of “linguistic hospitality” provides an important lens through which translation ethics can be examined. In addition, Ricoeur’s approach to ethics emphasized relational and justice dimensions which are crucial to examine in humanitarian settings.”
Ryoa Chung is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the Université de Montréal.
Matthew Hunt is an Associate Professor and the Director of Research in the School of Physical and Occupational Therapy at McGill University.
This article originally appears on the University of Edinburgh Law’s Justice in Global Health Emergencies & Humanitarian Crises Blog.
“Access to information has been described as a humanitarian good, alongside other basic needs such as food, water, shelter and healthcare [1]. Accountability is a major priority in the humanitarian sector, including accountability of non-governmental organizations toward the communities they serve. Coordination of aid between humanitarian organizations, and with local governments and agencies, has been identified as a key concern for effective crisis response [2]. And yet, All three of these activities – sharing information, practicing accountability and coordinating aid responses – are predicated upon the mobilization and exchange of knowledge, and serve to illustrate their centrality to humanitarian action. Important ethical concerns exist, however, when some individuals or groups are excluded from the pooling and exchange of knowledge. One source of exclusion relates to the linguistic dimensions of humanitarian aid: what languages are spoken by whom and for which purposes, what language barriers exist, what credibility or authority is or is not associated with people speaking certain languages, and whether translation is available….”
READ MORE AT: https://www.ghe.law.ed.ac.uk/epistemic-injustice-and-humanitarian-action-the-case-of-language-and-translation/
[1] Greenwood F, Howarth C, Poole D, Raymond N, Scarnecchia D. The Signal Code: A Human Rights Approach to Information During Crisis. Cambridge; 2016.
[2] Stephenson, Jr, M. (2005). Making humanitarian relief networks more effective: operational coordination, trust and sense making. Disasters, 29(4), 337-350.
Follow this link to see how Dr. Lisa Schwartz and the HHE team were the focus of a reflection on World Humanitarian Day by the McMaster Global Health Office.
A little over a year ago, several researchers working on ethical and justice based questions arising in global health emergencies (health crises of global concern) and in other humanitarian crises came together on a Wellcome Trust funded project entitled: “Vulnerability and Justice in Global Health Emergency Regulation: Developing Future Ethical Models.” Our key concerns were around how inequalities, vulnerabilities and various forms of injustices are often reinforced in these contexts, and how future public health responses could be better attuned to these issues.
We are delighted to announce that we recently launched our website “Justice in Global Health Emergencies & Humanitarian Crises”.
On this platform, we’re aiming to explore issues around vulnerability and justice during global health emergencies and humanitarian crises through a range of media:
We’re hoping that this website is a useful resource to academics, humanitarian workers, students, and the interested public alike. Ideally, we would like this to develop into a platform where researchers and humanitarian actors can engage with these topics and in dialogue with us.
If you are willing to share your thoughts and experience as practitioners or researcher in the form of a blog post, or would like to talk about your global health emergency or humanitarian crises experience on the podcast, please get in touch at ghe@ed.ac.uk.
New content will be posted on a regular basis, so we warmly invite you to sign up to our newsletter. You can also follow us on twitter (@GanguliMitra)
Takhliq Amir presented her fourth-year research project poster this week at McMaster University. Congratulations on the great analysis!
On March 14, McMaster’s Department of Health Research Methods, Evidence and Impact hosted its annual Research Day.
The HHErg was well represented this year with two poster presentations (below) and an oral presentation entitled, “Dying in the Margins: Palliative Care, Humanitarian Crises and the Intersection of Global and Local Health Systems.”
Downloadable PDF of the Natural Disasters Array poster.
Downloadable PDF of the Opportunities and Challenges poster.
Follow the link for online reading of Reflections 7(1)..
This edition of the HumEthNet newsletter looks at picturing humanitarian health ethics and two important new studies of perceptions & experiences of people often the subjects of aid campaigns.
Thank you to our contributors, Philippe Calain (MSF-Suisse & HumEthNet member), Siobhan Warrington of Oral Testimony, and David Girling from the University of East Anglia.
